The Alpha's Rejected Mate

Chapter 6 The betrayal

CHAPTER 6

The Betrayal

His name, Lira learned three days later, was Bren, and he had grown up two streets from her own house.

She hadn't recognized him at the summit because she hadn't seen him properly in years — he'd left Emberfall as a teenager, apprenticed out to a merchant caravan, or so everyone had believed at the time. In truth, according to the confession Kade's trackers eventually beat out of one of the retreating raiders, Bren had been quietly feeding information to Ashgrove since before Lira had even finished growing into her adult height. Household movements. Council decisions. Which bloodlines the Alpha's advisors watched most closely, and why.

"He grew up near you," Kade said, watching her carefully across the council table as the implications settled over her like cold water. "Lira. Was he ever close to your family? Anyone your mother trusted?"

Lira's mouth had gone dry. "He used to run errands for my grandmother. Before she died. My mother always said he was a sweet boy who never had much luck."

"He wasn't running errands," Kade said grimly. "He was watching your bloodline for Ashgrove before either of us was born, which means whatever Sorin claimed at the summit about not being your enemy—"

"I know what it means." Lira's voice came out sharper than she intended, the betrayal settling into her chest with a weight that made breathing briefly difficult. Every memory she had of Bren rearranged itself in the space of a few seconds — the boy who'd taught her to skip stones on the creek behind her house had spent his whole life reporting her family's business to people who wanted, apparently, to weaponize whatever slept in her blood. "It means the woods didn't choose me by accident. Someone's been watching for this moment since before I was born."

"Which means the rejection—" Kade stopped himself, some new and uglier realization crossing his face.

"What."

"If Ashgrove has been watching your bloodline for that long," he said slowly, "then someone close to my father knew, too. The intelligence that convinced me to reject you publicly — it didn't come from nowhere, Lira. It came from inside this pack. Someone here wanted us kept apart badly enough to manufacture a threat convincing enough to make me do it myself."

The two of them stared at each other across the table, the same cold understanding arriving in both their faces at once: whatever conspiracy had shaped the worst night of Lira's life wasn't finished. It had simply moved further underground.

Kade's response to that realization was, in Lira's opinion, spectacularly wrongheaded.

He confined her to the stronghold.

"For your protection," he said, in the tone of a man fully expecting an argument and bracing for it anyway, "until we know who inside Emberfall is working against us. I can't have you exposed while there's a traitor unaccounted for."

"You can't have me exposed," Lira repeated, "so your solution is to lock me in a building and post guards on the door. That's not protection, Kade. That's the exact same thing you did at the Choosing Moon — deciding what's best for me without asking me a single question first."

"It's not the same—"

"It's precisely the same!" The words came out louder than she meant, sharp enough that the lamp on the council table guttered violently, flame leaping and twisting though no draft had touched it. Lira barely noticed. "You rejected me in front of the entire pack because you decided, alone, that it was safer. Now you want to cage me in this stronghold because you've decided, alone, that it's safer. When exactly does anyone ask me what I want?"

Kade's jaw worked, some argument rising and being visibly swallowed back down. "I'm trying to keep you alive."

"Then trust me enough to help you do it," Lira said, "instead of deciding I'm something fragile you have to manage."

He didn't answer. The guards went up on the stronghold doors that same evening regardless, posted at Kade's order while he was called away to deal with the aftermath of the border incident, and Lira stood at her window watching torchlight flicker along the courtyard wall and felt something in her chest that had been simmering since the Choosing Moon finally, fully boil over.

She didn't decide to do what happened next. That was the truth she'd tell herself later, in the calmer version of events — that she hadn't chosen it so much as stopped, for one unguarded moment, holding it back.

The silver marks on her arm flared white-hot, searing rather than warm for the first time since the woods, and every torch along the courtyard wall guttered out at once, plunging the stronghold into total darkness broken only by the light pouring, impossibly, from beneath Lira's own skin — silver-gold, alive, radiating outward from her chest like something had finally been given permission to breathe.

Somewhere below, she heard shouting, the guards' confused voices rising in alarm, and Kade's voice cutting through all of it, closer than she expected, already running.

The last thing Lira registered before the light swallowed her vision entirely was the cold, clear certainty that whatever had just answered her fury wasn't finished — and that for the first time since the Hollow Woods had chosen her, she wasn't afraid of it at all.